Officers' Deaths Shake Academy

Young Navy Trio Expected To Go Far

December 03, 1993|By The Washington Post

People expected special things from Kerryn O'Neill, George P. Smith and Alton Grizzard, who knew each other as midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and wound up near each other again at Navy facilities in San Diego.

O'Neill, 21, had it all, friends and teachers said: brains, looks and athletic gifts that made her a track star at the academy where she graduated last May.

Smith, 24, handsome and square-jawed, had just completed an elite program in Groton, Conn., where the Navy trains its nuclear submarine engineers.

Grizzard, 24 and a former star quarterback for Navy, would end up an admiral, predicted one official in Annapolis. ``I told people ... we would hear something great from him,'' said another acquaintance, David Lillefloren, a longtime friend of the popular former athlete. ``That he would die in some foreign land, defending his country.''

Early Wednesday morning, two days after O'Neill broke off her engagement with Smith, three lives so full of promise ended in violence.

Police say Smith, evidently distraught about the breakup of his four-year relationship, walked to O'Neill's apartment at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado and shot Grizzard, who was visiting her. He then shot O'Neill and finally himself, later dying in an ambulance.

In Annapolis Thursday, as in O'Neill's home town of Kingston, Pa., and in Virginia Beach, where Grizzard went to high school, friends and former teachers grieved over the tragedy. Sometimes, they said, even the best and brightest fall victim to dark emotions.

Grizzard was an award-winning athlete in high school in Virginia Beach. Grizzard was voted Virginia's ``Football Player of the Year,'' according to his high school coach, Tommy Rhodes.

One police detective said O'Neill had wanted to end the engagement because ``she said she had other plans for her life,'' and Smith apparently accepted her decision at first. But he was also bitter, friends of the pair told detectives. Smith tried to change her mind and wrote her a 13-page letter that was found in O'Neill's apartment that night.